Joseph (“Joe”) Anokye, the director general of the National Communications Authority (NCA), has told Asaase News that it was a challenge for him to move back from the United States of America to work in Ghana.
Speaking in a yet-to-be-broadcast interview on Sunday Night with Nana Yaa Mensah, Anokye said what motivated him was the opportunity to serve Ghana.
“When the call came in I looked at the opportunities that I had inthe US and the fact that I’ve been given an opportunity to come to a country that we all love, to come and showcase my technical capabilities,” he said.
At the time, he had senior technical and management responsibilities, as the co-ordinator of a team of network specialists and aeronautical scientists at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, United States of America, a command outpost of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
But, he said: “I didn’t have to struggle at all. It was a challenge, though, leaving known to unknown. When you work on a campaign, you are not on the payroll, it’s all volunteering work. So essentially, I left a well-paid job to a no-pay job.”
Election data mastermind
Anokye is the architect of a sophisticated information/communications technology and data gathering masterplan used by the New Patriotic Party for its campaigns for the last two elections. He is also the technical brain behind the way the NPP rolled out the plan.
Under him, the NPP has been able to project the results of the last two elections accurately and in record time, even before the declarations by the Electoral Commission (EC)
“I understood what had happened during the previous election cycles in 2008 and 2012,” Anokye told Asaase News.
“And I certainly knew that if there was an area that the party needed to work on, it was the area of how to leverage technology to run your political campaign.”
Starred career
From 1997 to 2016, Joe Anokye worked on several contracts for NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. He was a senior telecommunications consultant, his work including supervision of the technical team for the Global Mission Telecommunication Wide Area Network. His work at NASA involved collaborative work between teams of aerospace, telecoms and network engineers in America, Australia, Canada, Germany and Japan.
Anokye was simultaneously a premier technical instructor for Cisco from 1999 to 2016, based in Washington, DC. He taught and mentored many engineers who work with government and private institutions in finance, regulation and security. He later worked as chief technology officer of the information technology and security services firm JMAT Systems, also based in Maryland.
He was, in addition, a consultant network technical engineer for Sprint Nextel, working for clients such as the financial services provider Charles Schwab, the supermarket KMART and UNICOR, which runs training courses for inmates of correctional facilities across the United States.
Big data projects
He developed the telecommunications masterplan on which the network infrastructure for Bangladesh’s 2011 census was built and provided ongoing technical support for the project in Bangladesh.
Anokye has worked on telecoms network projects in a number of African countries, but primarily in Ghana and Liberia, consulting for private clients such as CISCO and Merchant Bank Ghana Ltd as well as Ghana Telecom and the Bureau of National Communication.
Joe Anokye was appointed as the acting director general of the National Communications Authority on 24 January 2017 and confirmed in the post on 15 January 2018.
Tune in to “Sunday Night” today (20 December ) at 7pm for the full interview.
* This edition of “Sunday Night” will be rebroadcast on Asaase Radio 99.5 on Tuesday 22 December, starting at 7pm.
* Asaase Radio 99.5 – tune in or log on to broadcasts online
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